Arne Duncan Quotes
At a time when going to college has never been more important, it's never been more expensive, and our nation's families haven't been in this kind of financial duress since the great depression. And so what we have is just sort of a miraculous opportunity simply by stopping the subsidy to banks when we already have the risk of loans. We can plow those savings into our students. And we can make college dramatically more affordable, tens of billions of dollars over the next decade.
Duncan, Arne. Interview by Judy Woodruff. PBS NewsHour, Public Broadcasting Service, 30 Mar. 2010.
Arne Starkey Duncan is an American educator and was a United States Secretary of Education from January 2009 through July 2016. While his tenure as Secretary was marked by varying degrees of opposition from both social conservatives and teachers unions, he nevertheless enjoyed strong support from the US president who appointed him, Barack Obama. Conservatives and some parents resisted Duncan's push for all U.S. states to adopt the Common Core Standards to determine what students had learned, and most US teachers unions disliked his emphasis on the use of data from student tests to evaluate teachers and schools. Despite antagonism to the changes Duncan had introduced, Obama praised his work at the Department of Education by saying, "Arne has done more to bring our educational system – sometimes kicking and screaming – into the 21st century than anybody else."
